On militarisation of the militias

Interview in 'Spain and the World'

The first question we asked Camillo Berneri concerns the military situation
as he saw it.

"I have no special skill in military technique", he replied, "but I can
inform you of the impressions I received on the Huesca Front which I know well
because I have fulfilled in turn the roles of ordinary Militia man, of
political delegate of the 'Italian section' of the Ascaso Column and now of
delegate to the Defence Council. I have the impression that the militia has
made great advances. At the start, one was aware of a great lack of experience
in the struggle against modern engines of war: for example time was wasted in
shooting at aircraft flying at high altitudes, automatic weapons were
neglected in favour of those which comrades were used to handling; the problem
of roads was abandoned; ammunition was in short supply; liaison between
different arms and units was defective and sometimes absolutely zero.

"At the present moment the militia-men have profited from the lessons of
the last six months, transport has begun to be rationalised, roads are being
repaired, equipment is more abundant and better distributed, and into the
'mind of the column' is slipping this idea; the necessity of co-ordinating
command.

"We are forming divisions, and this will complete the economic plan of war,
and the best known representatives of the CNT and the FAI have made themselves
its supporters. In fact, it was these two organisations which were the first
to propose a united command in order to be able to exert a decisive pressure
on the weak points of the enemy lines, to relieve the pressure which the enemy
is exerting on besieged towns and to prevent unfavourable manoeuvres and
concentrations"

So, we observed, there is some good in militarisation"

"Certainly," Berneri replied with conviction, "but there is a distinction
to be made: there is on the one side military formalism which is not only
ridiculous, but also useless and dangerous, and on the other side there is
self-discipline. The latter can be extremely strict, as is the case in the
Durruti Column. Military formalism can be met, for example, in certain columns
controlled by the Workers Party for Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de
Unificacion Marxista, POUM). When one asserts, as is written in the code of
duty of the Uribarri Column, that "the soldier who knows how to salute
properly also knows how to fight", one is guilty of stupidity reminiscent of
Frederick II or Peter the Great.

"For my part I support a legitimate compromise: we must neither lapse into
military formalism not into superstitious anti-militarism. By accepting and
achieving the reforms imposed on us by the nature of things, we shall by the
self-same means, be in a position to resist the manoeuvres of Madrid and
Moscow, which are trying to establish, under the pretext of militarisation,
their military hegemony over the Spanish Revolution, in order to transform it
into the instrument of their political hegemony.

"As for myself, I consider it a mistake to talk, as do certain
representatives of the CNT-FAI of an overall or 'supreme' command instead of a
unity of command. (That is to say co-ordination in matters of the control of
the armed struggle). Their intentions are good, but the terms used leads to
dangerous confusion's!

"All things considered, therefore, the reforms needed in the militia, in my
opinion, would be the following: a clear distinction between military command
and political control, in the domain of the preparation and execution of the
operations of war; strict fulfilment of orders received, but maintenance of
certain fundamental rights: that of nominating and degrading
officers."

At this point the following question came to our lips: "What do you think of
the internal political situations as regards the position taken by the CNT and
FAI?"

"The necessity of Holy Alliance of all anti-fascist forces has led the
Spanish anarchists to consider as 'comrades' many of their enemies of
yesterday and to accept from their hands a part of the governmental
responsibilities. It is not easy to draw up an exact balance sheet of the
profit's and losses deriving from this experience, but I think that today we
have sufficient information for appraisal to be alarmed at the Russo-Bolshevik
infiltration into military and technical spheres, adding itself to the
dictatorial designs of the Marxist parties. On this last point, one can see a
certain weakening of the CNT, and the situation is dangerous. But I hope that
we shall overcome it victoriously, because among the Spanish anarchists, there
is no lack of men who see clearly and understand the necessity of returning as
soon as possible to the right path."

And collectivisation is it progressing?

"It is progressing to a certain extent, as you could realise yourselves.
One must be ignorant and of bad faith to talk, as certain dissident Communists
are doing, of a 'deadpoint' in the social revolution in Spain or to represent
the Spanish anarchists as 'conservatives' (exactly when collectivisation is
spreading and strengthening itself in regions, like the Levant and Catalonia,
where the anarchists have the greatest influence),

"If there is a conservative faction on the left, it is composed without
doubt, of the right-wingers of Spanish Social-Democracy and of the orthodox
organisations of Russian Bolshevism. For us the struggle is on between Fascism
and Libertarian Communism. For the 'moderates,' it is simply a matter of the
defence of democracy. But although the political horizons are distinct and
opposed, the plan of battle reunites all the factions on the left. The main
thing is to know whether the 'comrades' who are opposed to the social
revolution will go so far in limiting it as to betray the promise they have
given."

Comrade Berneri was on the point of leaving us, and we hastened to put a last
question: "What do you think of the behaviour of the Popular Front Government in
France as regards Rome and Berlin's policy of intervention"

"It is as cowardly as it is stupid. The Fascists have bombed Port-Bou, an
international station and the French government has stopped sending trains in
that direction! Another bombing of an Air France plane and no French machine
will cross the border of the Pyrenee's! Now France is busy preventing
anti-fascists from coming to fight in Spain, while the governments of Hitler
and Mussolini continue to send men, arms, planes and ammunition to the Fascist
forces. A reasonable policy of support for the Spanish government would have
allowed the anti-fascist militias to sort out the military mutiny in a few
days. But the French government persists in believing neutrality is possible
while it constitutes encouragement to the triple alliance of Hitler, Mussolini
and Franco. Only broad-based and decisive popular action in France and Britain
can force the respective governments of these countries to, adopt a less
absurd behaviour."

War and Revolution

The Spanish Republic was born in April 1931 out of a political revolution
that was almost peaceable. A Spanish Socialist leader recognised that this
revolution 'no habia removido las entranas del pais.' The mass of the people
were deceived by the Republic which was not given any social consolidation since
it did not give land to the peasants. The agrarian reform voted for by the
Cortes dragged on from scheme to scheme and was applied in homeopathic doses.

In October 1934, an Andalusian peasant represented several million of his
fellows when he said to Bertrand de Jouvenel, "The Socialists promised us land.
We are told that the application of agrarian reform is a very complicated
business. And we are still working for three pesetas a day."

The Republic had equally deceived the mass of the people in the towns. When
Ernest Toller asked a Catalan worker what he thought of the Republic, he
received the following very significant response, "It's just the old dog with a
new collar."

A Republic that showed itself determined to improve social conditions would
have been politically strong enough not to fear a Fascist insurrection. The
Republic did not protect capitalist interests solidly enough; no more did it
encourage the emancipation of the proletariat; it has historically been the
accomplice of Fascism in its obstinacy in searching for a compromise by means of
governmental groupings instead of consolidating its position by means of firm,
Socialist policies.

When the Fascist insurrection broke out, the Republic had succeeded in
politically polarising all the progressive trade union organisations and parties
solely because it appeared free of obvious reactionary infiltration, as the only
line of defence behind which the attack on conservative forces could be
sustained. It was the State that was accepted more than the Government. It
appeared to be an indispensable organ of liaison between the various
organisations of defence and the new administrative bodies, and also as a
regulating and unifying centre for the diverse left-wing political forces.

Beneath this apparent union, a deep split persisted. On the one hand there
were the 'loyalists', simply Republicans and more or less progressive. Close to
them were the Social Democrats for whom the struggle between Fascism and the
Social Revolution could be reduced to a war between Fascism and anti-fascism. On
the other hand one could find the anarchists and the cream of the proletariat,
both convinced that the instruction, 'to win the war' only had any real meaning
as an indication of an immediate aim. Achieving this aim was a vital absolute
necessity for all the left-wing parties and for all the trade union
organisations; it was also the condition for the political and social progress
of the whole nation. But that did not mean that the Social Revolution had to be
limited to a war 'between Madrid and Burgos', to a war 'between the Republic of
Azana and the government of Franco.'

The 'war' is in Spain a 'civil war,' that is a political and social armed
struggle. And it is this all the more from the fact that it is not a matter
there of straightforward factions fighting among themselves and having few
contacts with the life of the masses. This event has none of the characteristics
of a fight in hermetic isolation. A struggle between the supporters of Franco
and the supporters of Azana could have presented enough analogies in which the
social conquests of Catalonia, Aragon and the Levant have been started; with
this struggle in which the winners will transform the whole life of the nation
following a pre-determined political and social direction; with this struggle
which could not end in a retreat of troops, but only in the exodus of the
conquered.

The nature and extent of the conflict, its modes of development, the
inevitable conditions of its resolution are such that the features of this armed
struggle are those of 'war,' but that its essence is that of the 'Social
Revolution.'

The proletariat is engaged in a struggle with the bourgeoisie while the high
clergy and the military class are waging war on it, 'money provides the sinews
of war' as the French say.

The economic burden of the war can no longer be born by the bourgeoisie; a
new 'war economy' must therefore be stressed. An indispensable condition of a
powerful 'industry of war' is a 'war economy' which to exist as an economy must
have as its aim and as its essential raison d'etre widespread usefulness.

Financial and monetary problems, like all other economic problems, can not be
solved 'in economic terms' without damaging the interests of certain social
classes. However, we must not, under the pretext of the necessity of winning the
war, fall to the opposite extreme from the conservatives, into Socialist
extremism which would not take its inspiration from the necessities of the armed
struggle but from the formulae and programmes whose achievement is very far
off.

The most fruitful position is the 'centrist' position. I am going to depend,
in order to avoid all ambiguity, on a clear example. I think that the
socialisation of large and medium scale industry is a 'necessity of the war' and
an indispensable creation of 'the economy of war.' Certain anti-fascists are as
much persuaded of this as I am, but they are not as a matter of principle
collectivists. By supporting the 'current necessity' of the socialisation of
large and medium-scale industry, I shall have on my side these anti fascists who
will consent to it and will eventually come to assist.

I have, on the other hand, many reservations about the socialisation of small
scale industry with regard to the 'necessities of the war' end I am obliged to
enter into dispute with comrades who would want to extend industrial
socialisation to its maximum.

I call my position 'centrist.' On my right I have those who are opposed to
socialisation, on my left those who favour it absolutely and who have maximalist
tendencies; in the centre I find myself in the company of all the collectivists
who think like me and of plain anti-fascists, who retaining the belief that the
creation of a firm war economy is indispensable, think that one of the principal
factors of this economy is the socialisation of large and medium-scale industry.
The centrist position does not take account solely of the strictly economic and
current reasons which militate in favour of tolerance as regards the petty
bourgeoisie, but it also takes account of psychological reasons.

The Russian petty bourgeoisie fought on the side of the proletariat from 1917
to 1920; during the insurrection of March and April 1920 in the Ruhr, the petty
bourgeoisie took part in the struggle against Kapp and against the black
Reichswehr; in October 1934 in Madrid and in Catalonia the petty bourgeoisie
again took an active part in the insurrection, and it was the same in the
Asturian insurrection. Today while we are fighting against Fascism, we must
remember that if the peasants who were deceived by the failed agrarian reform
participated only weakly in the Spanish Socialist insurrection of October 1934,
it was the armed intervention of the Rabassaires (vine-growers' association)
which in July 1936 was one of the principal factors in the defeat of Fascism in
Catalonia.

Between the conservative declarations of Caballero and certain doctrinally
maximalist criticisms of the opportunism of the CNT and the FAI, I believe that
we must in a fair and timely fashion give a place to a straight forwardly
rational solution to the problems of the 'war economy.'

Such a restatement will certainly not suffice to set up bridges between us
and the POUM on the one hand and the controlling groups of the PSUC on the
other. But it will be able to facilitate a sincere and active understanding
among all true anti-fascists, and secondly will allow a more intimate
collaboration among all those who are sincerely Socialists.

Article which appeared in 'Guerra di Class' No. 13, 21st March 1936[7?].

The anarchists in government in Spain

Open letter to comrade Federica
Montseny

Dear Comrade,
It was my intention to address myself to all you comrade
ministers, but once the pen was in my hand, I addressed myself spontaneously to
you alone and I did not wish to go against this instinctive impulse.

The fact that I am not always in agreement with you neither astonishes you
nor irritates you, and you have shown yourself cordially oblivious to criticisms
which it would almost always have been fair, because it is human, to consider as
unjust and excessive. This is not a minor quality in my eyes, and it bears
witness to the anarchist nature of our mind. It is a certainty that effectively
compensates, as far as my natural friendship is concerned for the ideological
peculiarities which you have often revealed in your articles in your very
personal style and in your speeches of admirable eloquence.

I could not sit back and accept the identity that you claimed between
Bakunist anarchism and the federalist Republicanism of Pi y Margall. I cannot
pardon you for having written "that in Russia it was not Lenin the true builder
of Russia, but Stalin in fact, the effective spirit, etc." And I applauded
Voline's reply in 'Terre Libre' to your entirely false claims about the Russian
anarchist movement.

But it is not about that that I wish to talk with you. On these matters, and
indeed on others, I hope one day or another to talk to you personally. If I
address you in public, it is about matters that are infinitely more serious, to
remind you of the enormous responsibilities, of which you are perhaps not aware
because of your modesty

In your speech of 3rd January, you said,

"The anarchists have come into the Government in order to prevent the
Revolution from deviating from its course and in order to pursue it beyond the
war, and also in order to oppose all possibility of dictatorial endeavours,
wherever they should come from."

Well then, comrade, in April, after three months of collaborationist
experience, we find ourselves face to face with a situation in the course of
which serious actions are taking place, while other, worse ones are taking
shape.

Where, as in the Basque country, in the Levant and in Castille, our movement
is not imposed by grass-roots strength, in other words by vast ranks of
unionists and by the preponderant adherence of the masses, the
counter-revolution is oppressing people and threatens to crush everything. The
Government is at Valencia and it is from there that assault guards are setting
out, destined to disarm the revolutionary cells formed for defence. One calls to
mind Casas-Viejas while thinking of Vilanesa[1]. It
is the civil guards and the assault guards who are retaining their arms; it is
they too who in the rear must control the 'uncontrollable,' in other words
disarm the revolutionary cells equipped with a few rifles and a few revolvers.
This happens while the internal front has not been liquidated. This happens
during the course of a civil war in which every surprise is possible and in
regions where the front is very close and extremely jagged is not mathematically
certain. This, while a political distribution of arms appears clearly, tending
to arm only in strict necessity (strict necessity, which we hope will appear
adequate) the Aragon Front, the armed guard of agrarian collectivisation in
Aragon and buttress of Catalonia, that Iberian Ukraine. You are in a government
that has offered France and Britain advantages in Morocco, whereas, since July
1936, it would have been necessary to proclaim of officially the political
autonomy of Morocco. I can imagine what you, anarchist, must think of this
affair which is as disgraceful as it is stupid; but I believe that the time has
come to make it known that you and the other anarchist ministers are not in
agreement as regards the nature and the purport of such propositions.

"The operational base of the Fascist army is Morocco. We must intensify our
propaganda in favour of Moroccan autonomy throughout the pan-Islamic area of
influence. We must dictate to Madrid unambiguous declarations announcing the
abandonment of Morocco and the protection of Moroccan autonomy. France would
anxiously envisage the possibility of insurrectionary repercussions in North
Africa and Syria; Great Britain would see the movements for self-rule in Egypt
and among Arabs in Palestine growing stronger. We must exploit such anxieties
by means of a policy which threatens to unleash revolt throughout the Arab
world.

"For such a policy we need money and we need urgently to send agitators and
organisers as emissaries to all the centres of Arab migration, into all the
frontier zones of French Morocco. On the fronts in Aragon, the Centre, the
Asturias and Andalusia a few Moroccans would be enough to fulfil the role of
propagandists (through the radio, tracts, etc.)."

It follows that one cannot simultaneously guarantee British and French
interests in Morocco and carry on with insurrectionary work. Valencia is
continuing the policies of Madrid. This must change. And to change it, one must
state all one's own thoughts clearly and strongly, because in Valencia there are
influences acting which tends towards treating with Franco.

Jean Zyromski wrote in 'Populaire' of 3rd March: "The manoeuvres are visible
and they are aiming at the conclusion of a peace which, in reality, would
signify not only the halting of the Spanish Revolution, but also the annulment
of the social conquests already achieved.

"Neither Caballero nor Franco, such would be the formula which would
express briefly a conception which exists, and I am not sure that it does not
have the favour of certain political, diplomatic and even governmental circles
in Britain and also in France."

These influences, these manoeuvres explain different obscure points: for
example the inactivity of the loyalist fleet. The concentration of troops coming
from Morocco, the acts of piracy against 'Canaries' end 'Balearics,' the capture
of Malaga are the consequences of this inactivity. And the war is not finished!
If Prieto is incapable and indolent, why tolerate him? If Prieto is bound-by a
policy that makes him paralyse the fleet, why not denounce this policy?

You anarchist ministers, you make eloquent speeches and you write brilliant
articles, but it is not with speeches and articles that one wins the war and
defends the Revolution. The former can be won and the latter can be defended by
allowing us to pass from the defensive to the offensive. The strategy of holding
our position cannot last for ever. The problem cannot be resolved by throwing
out orders: general mobilisation, arms to the Front, sole command, popular army
etc. etc. The problem can be resolved by achieving immediately what can be
achieved.

The 'Toulouse Dispatch' of 17th January wrote,

"The main preoccupation of the Minister of the Interior is with
re-establishing the authority of the State over that of the groups and over
that of the uncontrollable whatever their origin."

It follows that when for months they try to annihilate the 'uncontrollables',
they cannot resolve the problem of the liquidation of the 'Fifth Column[2].'
The suppression of the internal front has as its primary condition activity
aimed at investigation and repression which can only be accomplished by tried
and tested revolutionaries. An internal policy of collaboration between the
classes and of flattery towards the middle classes leads inevitably to tolerance
towards politically ambiguous elements. The Fifth Column is composed not only of
elements belonging to Fascist bodies, but also of all the malcontents who desire
a moderate republic. Now, it is these latter elements who profit from the
tolerance of the hunters of the 'uncontrollables'.

The liquidation of the internal front was a condition of full and radical
activity by the Defence Committees set up by the CNT and the UGT.

We are assisting in the infiltration into the controlling ranks of the
popular army of ambiguous elements without offering guarantees of political and
union organisation. The committees and political delegates of the militias were
exercising a beneficial control, which, today, is weakened by the predominance
of strictly military systems of advancement and promotion. We must strengthen
these committees and these delegates.

We are assisting the new situation which could have disastrous consequences,
a situation in which whole battalions are commanded by officers who do not enjoy
the esteem and affection of the soldiers. This situation is grave because the
value of the Spanish militia-men is directly proportional to the confidence
enjoyed by their own commander. It is therefore necessary to re-establish the
system of direct election and the right of dismissal by those below.

A grave error has been committed by accepting authoritarian formulae, not
because they are such from the point of view of their form; but because they
contain tremendous errors and political aims that have nothing to do with the
necessities of the war.

I had the chance to talk to senior Italian French and Belgian officers and I
ascertained that they give a clear indication of knowing the real necessities of
discipline, a much more modern and rational conception than certain neo-generals
who claim to be realists.

I believe that the hour has come to form the confederal army, in the same way
as the Socialist Party has set up its own company: the 5th regiment of the
popular militias. I believe that the hour has come to resolve the problem of
sole command by effectively achieving unity of command which allows us to move
onto the offensive on the Aragon Front. I believe that the hour has come to
finish with the thousands of civil guards and assault guards who do not go to
the Front because their job is to control the 'uncontrollables.' I believe that
the hour has come to create a war industry in earnest. And I believe that the
hour has come to finish with certain flagrant extravagances: like those of
respect for Sunday as a day of rest and of certain 'rights for the workers'
sabotaging the defence of the Revolution.

We must, above all, keep up the morale of the combatants. Louis Bertoni,
interpreting the sentiments expressed by various Italian comrades fighting on
the Huesca Front, wrote not so long ago:

"The war in Spain, thus stripped of all new faith, of all ideas of social
change, of all revolutionary greatness, of all universal meaning, is no more
than a common war of national independence, which must be earned out to avoid
the extermination which the world plutocracy has in mind. There remains the
terrible question of life or death, but it is no longer a war to assure a new
regime and a new humanity. People will say that all is not yet lost; but in
reality, everything is threatened and beleaguered; our side use the language
of renunciation, the same as was used by Italian Socialism at the advance of
Fascism: Beware of provocation! Calm and serenity! Order and discipline! All
the things that in practice boil down to doing nothing. And as in Italy
Fascism finished up by triumphing, in Spain, anti-socialism in republican garb
cannot but win, unless anything that we have not foreseen should come to pass.
It is useless to add that we are simply setting it down, without condemning
those on our side; we could not say how the behaviour of these people could be
different and efficacious, as long as the Italo-German pressure grows at the
Front and that of the Bolshevik bourgeois grows in our rear."

I do not have Louis Bertoni's modesty. I have the pretension to assert that
the Spanish anarchists could have a political line different from the prevailing
one; I claim to be able by capitalising on what I know of experiences in various
great revolutions of recent years and on what I read in the Spanish libertarian
press itself, to advise certain lines of conduct.

I believe that you must pose yourself the problem of knowing if you are
better defending the Revolution, if you are making a greater contribution to the
struggle against Fascism by participating in the government, or if you would not
be infinitely more useful carrying the flame of your magnificent skill with
words among the combatants and to the rear.

The time has also come to clarify the significance for unification that our
participation in the Government could have. We must speak to the masses, appeal
to them to judge whether Marcel Cachin is right when he states in 'Humanite' of
23rd March.

"The responsible anarchists are multiplying their efforts towards
unification, and their appeals are ever more sensible."

. . . Or whether 'Pravda' and 'Izvestra' are right when they slander the
Spanish anarchists calling them saboteurs of unity. To appeal to the masses to
judge the moral complicity and policy of silence of the Spanish anarchist press
as regards the dictatorial offences of Stalin, the persecution of Russian
anarchists, the monstrous case against the Leninist and Trotskyist opposition, a
silence deservedly rewarded by 'Izvestia's' libelling of 'Solidaridad
Obrera'.

To appeal to the masses to judge whether certain acts of sabotage of
provisioning do not fall within the plan announced on 17th December 1936 by
'Pravda:'

"As for Catalonia, the purging of Trotskyist and anarcho-syndicalist
elements has begun; this work will be carried out with the same energy with
which it was done in the USSR."[3]

The time has come to find out whether the anarchists are in the Government to
be the vestal virgins tending a fire that is on the point of going out, or even
if they are there from now on to serve as a 'Phyrgian cap'[4] for
politicians flirting with the enemy or with the forces for the restoration of
the 'Republic of all classes.' The problem is set by the clear evidence of a
crisis which is outstripping the men who are the personages who embody it.

The dilemma: war or revolution no longer has any meaning. The only dilemma is
this one: either victory over Franco thanks to the revolutionary war, or
defeat.

The problem for you and the other comrades is to chose between the Versailles
of Thiers and the Paris of the Commune, before Thiers and Bismarck form the holy
alliance. It is up to you to reply, for you are the 'light under the
bushel.'

Article which appeared in 'Guerra di Class' No. 12, 14th April 1937.

1 Vilanesa, small Spanish village where many CNT militants were
massacred after their union premises had been looted.

2 Fifth Column, name given in Spanish press to the grouping of
Fascist organisations existing behind the Republican Front.'

3 The translation is incorrect, but the sense is similar; see
Mintz 'Self-management in Revolutionary Spain.'

Between the war and the Revolution

There are many among us who have arrived at the point of describing the
armed intervention of powers which have economic and military interests opposed
to those of Italy and Germany.

If these two nations enter the lists with all the forces that they have at
their disposal, it is clear that only the intervention of Russia, France and
Great Britain reunited could assure Spanish anti-fascism of victory in the war.
But it is also clear that before the armed intervention of these powers could
crush the fascist forces, enough time could have elapsed to allow the fascists
to crush the revolutionary forces.

The English and French capitalist states have an interest in preventing the
victory of the Spanish fascists coming to the point at which it is exploited by
Italy and Germany, but they have no interest in seeing the Iberian revolution
triumph. In the situation in which Italy and Germany were to intervene in Spain
with the immediate intention of attacking France (a surprise attack in the
western Mediterranean), it would be possible that Great Britain and Russia would
intervene immediately. But it such were not the case, it would be possible for
the Spanish Revolution to be crushed before the intervention could take
place.

We cannot place any hope, as do certain naive and numerous hypocrite, in the
paralytic of Lake Geneva. Madrid is being tortured by Fiats, Capronis and
Junkers piloted by Italian and German aviators; The Balearics are subject to the
terrorising dictatorship of a close-cropped Italian fascist, and thousands of
German and Italian mercenaries are landing in Spain with arms and baggage. The
Italo - German armed intervention could not be more obvious, more active, more
engrossing. The appeals sent to the League of Nations by the Spanish Government
found an assembly of spontaneously deaf men ludicrously occupied in tangling up
procedural chicaneries.

We cannot hope for more France In the same way as Eden placed in the scales
of international justice the independence of Ethiopia and world war, Blum has
placed there the liberty of the Spanish people and world war. 'War: that is the
ransom. We do not accept it!'

No one hates war more than us, but we believe that the moment has come when
the truth of the phrase once stated by Leon Blum will be proved: "We must accept
the possibility of war to save peace."

The policy of non-intervention has not stopped Bolivia attacking Uruguay to
dispute its right to the Chaco, it has not stopped Japan annexing Manchuria, it
has not stopped Italy's fierce conquest of Ethiopia. Pacifism follows a road
paved, like that to Hell, with good intentions, but this road leads into the
abyss.

The peace of Geneva is heavy with massacres and ruins. The peace of Geneva:
it is an arms race, the crushing of the militarily most feeble peoples, it is
the Italian Duce and the German Fuhrer, ever more powerful and always helping in
the creation of new Fascist states.

The International Trade Union Federation and the Socialist International
continue to associate themselves with this tactic of non-intervention supported
by the French and English governments, and during this time, the Fascist
intervention has penetrated to the very heart of Spain. The mass of working
people must choose: either their intervention or the triumph of Fascism. And
they do not move. It is in vain that they repeat: "Spain is the scene of a
struggle which, by its consequences, goes beyond the frontiers of the country,
because it is in Spain that Fascism is playing its last card."

We must not overestimate the imperialist designs of the Italo - German
intervention and envisage them exclusively in relation to future developments in
their Mediterranean expansion. Spain is for Mussolini and Hitler an immediate
conquest, a current problem. Overcoming the Spanish revolution is equivalent for
Italian and German fascism to the conquest of Spain. Fascism victorious in Spain
means the revolution broken and the way open to imperialist conquests. This will
therefore mean war, the enslaving of the European proletariat, a 'new Middle
Ages.'

The French and English proletariat will do nothing to help the Spanish
proletariat. It is useless for us to delude ourselves. It would be dishonest to
do it to ourselves.

And so it is the Spanish revolution that is in danger, whatever may be the
outcome of the Civil War.

A surprise armed intervention on the part of Britain, Russia and France is
not likely, but such an intervention would not be at all impossible at the
moment when Spain is on the point of dying. This would be the intervention of
the lions against the hyenas. It would perhaps be the intervention that would
snatch Spain from Italo - German imperialism, but it would be to stifle the fire
of the Spanish Revolution.

Already today, Spain is between two fires Burgos and Moscow.

The strength of the Spanish Anarcho-syndicalist movement must not dazzle us.
On the day when the army corps of France Britain and Russia intervene after an
exhausting struggle between the revolutionary forces and the Hispano - Italo -
German Fascist coalition, on that day the Social Revolution will be halted and
the way opened to the bourgeois revolution.

Once Fascism has been crushed it is possible that the Anarcho-syndicalist FAI
and CNT will continue to fight to achieve their social programme. But in that
case the Socialist communist bloc will oppose them.

It is 'Le Populaire' of 27th November, 1936 which gives us this view.

The Republicans, the Socialist leaders and the Communists are already agreed
on a 'constitutionalist' platform. The Executive Committee of the Spanish
Communist Party recently declared that in the current struggle it intends to
defend democracy and safeguard private property. There is a smell of Noske in
the air. If Madrid were not in flames, one would be obliged to recall Kronstadt
again. But the policy of Madrid is on the point of triumphing. It has refused
arms or money to revolutionary Catalonia in order to place itself in the hands
of the USSR which has provided arms and the officers who are destined to control
the anti-fascist struggle and to halt the development of the Social Revolution
in the armed struggle against Fascism.

Black clouds are building up on the horizon and we are blinded by fogs.

Let us set our lights and hold the tiller with a hand of steel. We are on the
high seas and the tempest is raging. But we can still perform miracles. Caught
between the Prussians and Versailles, the commune lit a fire which still lights
the world.

Between Burgos and Madrid there is Barcelona.

Let the Godets of Moscow think on that

Article which appeared in 'Guerra di Class' No. 6, 16th December 1936.

Madrid, sublime city

Pilate is just as infamous as Judas. Who is Pilate today? He is not even
the assembly of Geneva foxes, he is not even the ostriches of Social-democrat
Ministerialism. Pilate is you, the European proletariat!

Can you, oh tender proletarian mother tuck your little child into its bed
without seeing mangled children lying abandoned in the roads like carrion. Can
you play lovingly with your child, oh proletarian, without thinking of the
children lying in pain in hospitals, suffering the tortures of their wounded
flesh and the anguishes of fear.

And yet you read left-wing papers and you know that there exists a great city
running with blood, torn apart and reduced to ashes by explosions of shells;
they tell that the children have been surprised by death when they were shouting
to the heavens the songs of their unconcern, that their mothers roam about
searching for the fruit of their wombs and carry their blood-stained bodies in
search of unlikely or belated help. The stench of death rises from dispatches
and correspondence from Madrid. The sky over Madrid is red with fires which
should set the world aflame. And yet, everything collapses, everything burns, a
whole population is dying - without the masses being affected.

In the agony of Madrid there is all the horror of a rape in the market-place
on market day.

Death can continue to strike, sudden as hail in summer and unavoidable as
lightening. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had for themselves the calm of
high altitudes and the moral void of the époque. Let them shake it, let them
rend it apart, let them burn it slowly, this martyred city; millions of
proletarians don't care at all about it. Is Madrid resisting? Many wonder how
long it can hold out. It is a European bullfight. It is a disgrace to the
peoples and not merely to the governments and the classes. It is the blockade of
anti-fascist indifference that adds itself to the criminal Fascist siege.
Meetings will not stop the aircraft from flying through the sky over Madrid and
scattering death and ruin. The cold sweat that weighs on the brows of mothers,
the eyes of children enlarged by fear, the bodies pounded and shaken by the
convulsions, are no more than a future vision of what you will suffer, you who
are entrenched in non-intervention! Today, the war is in the sky over Madrid,
tomorrow it will be in the sky over it Barcelona, the day after tomorrow in the
sky over Paris. The European war has started again. It exists, even if it has
not been declared. These are the aircraft and pilots of Mussolini's Italy and
Hitler's Germany which are massacring and ruining Madrid.

The horror of it no longer touches people's consciences? Well then, the bombs
will waken them. And that will be Historic justice.

Madrid, the joyous Vienna of the Iberian Peninsular is reviving the deeds of
Sagonte. It has passed from the lovers' waltz to the Heroic Symphony. Epic
witness of the acts of heroism of the masses and the militias, beside which
those of the Commune of Paris pale in comparison; it is disappointing the
warlike hopes of the generals it will expose their careful calculations, it will
give the lie to their boastfulness. It is resisting and will resist. If the
compassion of the masses is deaf, it Europe is incapable of anger, well then,
the whole world will be branded by the energy of this city. Madrid will not be
taken. It can be completely destroyed, but it will not be taken alive.

Death, exodus and the flames will make of it a new Pompeii to the very
end.

If it is not the wings of victory, it will be those of Nemesis that are
unfolded above it. The reputation of the Fascist generals is assured, but it
will be the reputation of Genghis Khan. It will he another Commune. but it will
not be a final glimmer; it will be the blazing up of a fire that will bring all
the 'spectators' out of their lairs, at least as long as it does not burn them
there in their Blumist beds.

Madrid where here thousands of men are fighting with an ardour nourished and
sustained by the presence of thousands of women and children is in the process
of pillorying its hangmen and the blind and deaf masses. It is in the process of
lighting for all a light which will once more permit of hope in man.

Non - intervention and international involvement in the Spanish Civil
War

Originally - The Third Stage

The Civil War in Spain has entered into its third phase. The first was that
of the 'Fascist military putsch' curbed by the revolutionary forces with the CNT
and the FAI at their head, and by the resistance of the proletarian masses of
Barcelona. The second is that of the 'Civil War;' on one side are part of the
army and the police forces led by factious [fascist?] officers, on the other
side are the workers' and peasants' militias guided by loyalist officers and
controlled by the different advanced or progressive parties. It is a civil war
with a guerrilla aspect, the social developments of which are clothed in a
revolutionary and collectivist character, especially in Catalonia, Aragon and
the Levant areas which come under the influence of the CNT and the FAI. We are
still in this second phase on which a third 'international' phase is however
coming to superimpose itself, due to the overt intervention of Italo - German
Fascism on the one side, and on the other of Russian Bolshevism.

Henceforth the development of the internal situation is subject in the main
to foreign factors. These are the Hitlerians and the anti-fascist émigrés of
Germany and Austria, the Italian Fascists and anti-fascists, the Bolshevik
Russians and the White Russians, the French Communists and the Irish Catholics -
who are at grips with one another on the Madrid front. The relationships between
the forces are in the process of changing, militarily and politically. The Civil
War is in the process of taking on a faster rhythm, an even broader field of
action, a more decided character, whilst the Russian intervention assures the
hegemony of the Socialist-Communist forces which up to now were completely
dominated by the Anarchist forces.

I have said and I repeat: the Civil War can be won in the military arena, but
the triumph of the political and social revolution is threatened. The problems
of the future in Spain are henceforth indissolubly linked to the international
developments of the Civil War.

The fact that the French and British governments are transforming their
legations in Addis Ababa into consulates leads one to expect that they will
recognise the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Will Mussolini separate from
Germany, abandoning the Fascist intervention in the affairs of Spain? I do not
think so. For that it would be necessary for the Quai d'Orsay and the Foreign
Office to take the decision to say firmly, Enough! But, to the contrary, what do
we see?

The Blum Cabinet, obsessed by fear of war, puts up with anything: it allows
them to shoot the French journalist Aguillard, to kill Deiapree, the Paris-Soir
correspondent who was flying to Madrid in a plane belonging to the French
embassy and it even permits them to shell an Air France plane on French
territory. Let the Fascist forces threaten to cut the line between Cerbere and
Port Bou. Let them threaten to scuttle the French vessels like they scuttled the
Russian steamer 'Komsosnol' let them busy themselves with unleashing the
Moroccan uprising: all this will not snake the Blum Government decide to
remonstrate with the brigands of Burgos.

The Italian government is recruiting 'volunteers' for Franco and setting them
down in their thousands in Portugal and Spanish Morocco. An Italian Fascist
brigade has already revealed itself on the Madrid front at the outposts in the
Carabanchel Sector. And Hitler continues to send thousands of volunteers to
swell Franco's ranks.

The military victory of Fascism in Spain would correspond to the Italo-German
encirclement of France. The 'Ami du Peuple' comments thus on the report in the
'News Chronicle' of the sending of at least five German divisions to Spain:

"From the rate at which the German landings in the peninsula are going, it
is no longer just along the Rhine that we must be on our guard, but also on
the Pyrennes. Let the Fuhrer develop his schemes and France risks being
surrounded, or at the least having two German frontiers. Such is the stern
truth. It manifestly transcends doctrinal preferences for one or the other of
the Iberian factions."

It is evident that at present a reactionary opinion in favour of neutrality
in the war in Spain is emerging strongly in France. It is a change of direction
which could favour immensely a firm policy in favour of anti fascist Spain on
the part of the Blum Cabinet.

Many French people justify their government's policy as regards the Spanish
Civil War by saying: Britain is not behind us. We have reached it is true a
'gentleman's agreement' between Italy and Britain. Mussolini accepted the
conditions which he had refused a few months earlier in order to renew
commercial relations with Britain, he signed the protocol on submarine warfare,
Italy confirmed once again that he has no intention of invading the Balearics.
The Mediterranean: that is what preoccupies the British Empire. Mussolini,
having in his speech of 1st November last claimed the right to Italian expansion
in the Mediterranean, had alerted Britain as much as Yugoslavia, Greece and
Turkey.

Mussolini, after having calmed the Foreign Office on the Mediterranean
question, continues his flirtation with Wilhelmstrasse, while the Quai d'Orsay
perseveres in its role as the easy going cuckold. And Hitler, persuaded that
France will not move, is in the process of preparing (according to 'l'Oeuvre')
to strike against Czechoslovakia.

In brief, while Mussolini, Hitler and Eden are playing for high stakes, the
Blum Cabinet is lighting candles and reciting Novenae without any plan of
action, without any show of bravery and without the least dignity.

Unconcerned and neutral in the face of the sacrifice of Irum, apathetic and
prudent at the martyrdom of Madrid, Blum waits and hopes. He is full of
confidence and he polishes the feathers of his white dove, while deluding
himself and others.

Irun, Heusca and Saragossa would have been the tombs of Fascism if we had
prevented Brenn and Caesar from throwing their own swords unto the Fascist side
of the balance of the Spanish Civil War. Now the stake is Madrid: even if it
costs massacres and ruins.

The time which has elapsed between the neutrality of sabotage and help in
dribs and drabs has allowed a guerrilla campaign (which would rapidly have dried
up or ended in the victory of the proletarian militias) to be transformed into a
civil war which has all the horrors of a major war and which is a danger to the
equilibrium in Europe.

At the time when a determined surgeon was necessary, Blum has been no more
than a timid homeopath.

If the division of 'blond Moors' and Black Shirts come to reinforce Franco's
ranks, all Spain will be transformed into a theatre of desperate struggles. One
cannot limit such a conflagration. And those who did not wish to and did not
know how to extinguish the fire when it started will bear the burden of a
tremendous responsibility.

The crucified city of Madrid is already denouncing its Pontius Pilate. Leon
Blum? Not just him but thousands, millions of men. Even you, French proletariat!
A man, whatever he may be, does not bar the road to the masses when they are
marching towards liberty and justice.

To save Dreyfus, your boulevards, Paris, have been in uproar. So they were to
save Ferrer. They were again to save Sacco and Vanzetti.

Now they are not crying out in anger, they are not any longer the arteries of
France's heart, they are no longer the beds of those powerful torrents of
protest which washed away so many disgraces to save man's dignity. Madrid is
crucified. Madrid is to be burnt at the stake. What is Paris doing?

That is not enough, Paris is not giving its richest, most powerful most
European possession: its anger, its loud voice of protest.

If Paris is enraged, the whole world is silent and turns to listen. The
"great transmitter of all just campaigns it cannot send out its powerful SOS for
revolutionary Spain.

Paris, yell out your pity for the martyred, sublime city of Madrid, your
protests against the Spanish proletariat's executioners, your hate for the
enemies of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which you have affirmed with three
great revolutions.

Let your powerful voice condemn Burgos, Rome and Berlin; let it strengthen
Madrid and the other martyred cities; let it encourage the generous fighters of
the anti - fascist militias who are defending the rights of the producers and
the dignity of the citizens; let it fill the procrastinating ministers with
shame; let it be finally your great generous voice, the voice of your greatest
days, the voice that comes from the very depths of your heart.

This voice has thundered so many times with the love that must take up the
axe and it is that, the deepest love!

What Spanish anarchism must do to win

Originally - What can we do?

1. To believe that, thanks to a policy of non-intervention, one can eliminate
the possibility of an international armed conflict is to procrastinate while the
problems worsen. It would permit Italy, Germany and Portugal to prepare
themselves better for the war and allow the Spanish Fascist forces to lay in
supplies of arms and munitions.

If Fascism were victor, France would he threatened in the south and the
balance of forces in the Mediterranean would be permanently upset in favour of
Italy and Germany who would emerge from this adventure stronger and more
aggressive. Italy is seriously committed in Ethiopia, and Germany is in a very
bad financial situation; do they want a war 'immediately?' No. They could go to
war but they do not deliberately want a war straight away. If they wanted it,
they would already have set it in motion in Spain. We therefore have to adopt a
forceful foreign policy, having as its basis Portugal which has eluded the
control of Great Britain. Geneva is powerless. The only thing to do is therefore
to break with Portugal by means of the following measures: the immediate
expulsion of all Portuguese diplomatic representatives; immediate and complete
closure of the border with Portugal; confiscation of all goods belonging to
Portuguese capitalists resident in Spain.

As for Germany and Italy: the immediate expulsion of all their diplomatic
representatives, suspension of the right of German airlines to fly over Spanish
territory, the prohibition of all ships flying German or Italian colours from
entering Spanish ports, the suspension of all immunity for bourgeois Germans and
Italians residing in Spain.

Such a foreign policy would have as its immediate effect that of forcing
Britain and France to adopt a definite position. If it were to give rise to the
armed intervention of Italy and Germany, that intervention would at least be
provoked now and not at the time chosen by these powers.

2. The operational base of the fascist army is Morocco. We must intensify our
propaganda in favour of Moroccan autonomy throughout the pan-Islamic area of
influence. We must dictate to Madrid unambiguous declarations announcing the
abandonment of Morocco and the protection of Moroccan autonomy. France would
anxiously envisage the possibility of insurrectionary repercussions in North
Africa and in Syria; Great Britain would see the movements for self-rule in
Egypt and among Arabs in Palestine growing stronger. We must exploit such
anxieties by means of a policy which threatens to unleash revolt throughout the
Arab world.

For such a policy we need money and we need urgently to send agitators and
organisers as emissaries to all the centres of Arab migration, into all the
frontier zones of French Morocco. On the fronts in Aragon, the Centre, the
Asturias and Andalusia a few Moroccans would be enough to fulfil the role of
propagandists (through the radio, tracts, etc.).

3. Given our lack of arms and munitions, we must expand production on the
spot by making use of foreign technicians, whose utilisation has been very badly
organised; we must also rapidly create all the war industries possible and put
an end to the wastage of munitions by giving far-reaching instructions and
decisive orders.

4. We must achieve 'unity' just as much in the general and specific plan of
the military operations which must be carried out on all fronts as in liaison
among the commands of the areas by means of a General Staff controlled by a
'National Defence Committee.'

5. We must completely and without pity eliminate the Fascist remains which
oblige us to maintain a front line within our ranks and have recourse to
systematic searches, mass arrests of people who are not in unions who are of the
right age and physical condition for military service, strict control of new
recruits to the trade unions etc. ....

6. We must force Madrid to reconstitute immediately all the Spanish
diplomatic corps which will have to be reformed with members chosen by the
'National Defence Committee.'

Article which appeared in 'Guerra di Class' No. 3. 24th October. 1936

Translation in 'The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review' Number 4, 1978

Beware, Dangerous Corner!

1. I shall not say like some people: I cannot be silent! No, I want to
talk. I have a duty to do it and I have a right to do it in the name of the
self-criticism which is the essence of any party or movement concerned to retain
its own appearance and to accomplish its own historic mission Persuaded that the
Spanish Revolution is rapidly approaching a dangerous corner, I seized my pen as
I would seize a rifle or a revolver With the same determination, but also with
the same ferocity. Please allow me a style suited to the atmosphere of war in
which I live: the style of a hail of machine gun fire.

2. The military situation has not improved. These are the principal reasons:
lack or scarcity of arms and ammunition, absence of a united command, general
inadequacy of the leaders, the capitulating attitude on the part of the central
government, dualism and antagonism between Madrid and Barcelona. It appears
clearly that we must change from a war of positions to a war of movement,
unleashing the offensive according to a broad and solid general plan. Henceforth
time is against us. We must definitely accelerate the process of war in order to
pass beyond the phase of the war into the fuller and more profound one of the
Social Revolution.

3 We must master the war, but we shall not master the war by limiting the
problem to the strictly military conditions of victory. We must above all take
account of the 'socio - political' conditions of victory.

The Civil War in Spain being an international conflict, it is on
international ground that we must pose the problem of revolutionary action in
terms of war, it is at its weak points: Morocco and Portugal that we must
cruelly wound Spanish Fascism. Up till now the obsessing preoccupation with
equipment for war has not permitted us to implement a plan of action which
carried out in a timely and skilful manner would have been able to frustrate the
Fascist Putsch The Anarchists who assume the roles of generals would do well to
remember their own experiences as revolutionaries.

4. When the CNT in Madrid declares that 'el gobierno de Madrid no sabe dingir
la guerra' (the government in Madrid does not know how to run the war), this
inevitably poses the problem not only of the intervention of the CNT in the
running of the war but also of the conditions and form of such an intervention.
It is not a matter of superhuman reforms, but simply of a broad, profound and
rapid reform of the controlling groups and the organs and means of liaison among
the various columns. The militarisation of the militias is not a solution of a
technical nature only, and it is a political fault to have accepted it
peacefully without clarifying its purposes, without illustrating its obscure
points and without having discussed its principal outlines. The 'column spirit'
end the confusion between the power of political control and the power of
military command can justify in part the decree of the Generalitat of Catalonia,
but such a decree does not help at all towards the solution of the vital
problems of the military victory of the revolution.

5. It is not possible to find a solution to the problem of the needs of the
war until after we have resolved the question of Spanish politics.

Fabregas, councillor for economics of Catalonia could declare;

"We sent to Madrid a commission to ask the Government for credit of 300
million pesetas and also for the purchase of equipment for the war and 150
million francs for the purchase of raw materials. We offered as security 1000
million pesetas in government bonds belonging to our savings banks and
deposited with the Bank of Spain. All that has been, refused
us."
(Solidaridad Obrera, 29th September).

Madrid is not content just to reign, it wants to govern as well. As a whole
the Spanish Government is just as hostile to the Social Revolution as to
Monarchist and clerical fascism. Madrid desires a 'return to legality' and
nothing else. Arming Catalonia, financing Catalonia, that signifies to Madrid
arming the columns which carry the revolution on the points of their bayonets
and supplying the new egalitarian economic order.

We must therefore, addressing ourselves to the Government in Madrid, give it
the choice between defeat in the war and the revolution and victory.

6. Given that it is clear that the Government in Madrid is developing a
'policy of war' capable of ensuring its political hegemony and blocking the
development of the Social Revolution; that the Communist Party (following
directives laid down by Moscow) is tending to become the Foreign Legion of
Democracy and Spanish Liberalism and that Spanish Social democracy at the very
least, its controlling ranks is revolutionary . . . in the manner of Caballero;
it is therefore necessary that our press (without even raising the threat of
war, of a 'march on Madrid' without even unleashing a polemic against the
Communists and the Socialists, without even threatening the stability of the
alliance between the CNT and the UGT) is at the very least cured of its
intoxication with the unfortunate spins of 'holy union' which has ended up by
reducing political criticism to an imperceptible minimum. 'Solidaridad Obrera'
by exalting the Bolshevik government of the USSR, albeit in parentheses,
achieved the summit of political naiveté.

7. The purging of the internal front is henceforth restrained by the
normalisation, in terms of the police and the judiciary, of the struggle against
Fascism. The fact that some elements of the CNT and FAI have gone into police
organisations is not sufficiently compensated by an autonomy which would have
allowed speed and discretion in their duties and missions. And we must add to
that certain absurd arrangements and certain red-tapisms that should have been
abolished by the representatives of the CNT and the FAI continue to exist and
are having disastrous effects.

8. The work of selecting military, health and administrative personnel is
very incompetent. This selection could have been carried out by being based on
the possibility of replacing immediately and equally, incompetent and unsafe
elements by foreign elements faithful to the cause of the Spanish Revolution, or
at least tested anti-fascists. This has not been tried.

In the same way the CNT does not make sufficient use of experts who could at
present replace incompetent and suspect experts and tomorrow constitute the
guiding cadres of libertarian communism

9. Some time ago the CNT and the FAI adopted, with respect to the
'normalisation' of the Spanish Revolution, an attitude of self-denial.
'L'Espagne Antifasciste' has denounced this phenomenon with great courage and
keenness, I shall therefore not dwell on it. In short: the suppression of the
Central Committee of the militias as well as the power of the workers' and
soldiers' committees constitutes an outrage against the trade union control of
the militias. I think that it is not without reason that 'Le Temps' heaves a
sigh of relief while stating that the 'social revolution in Catalonia is
becoming more and more egalitarian.'

10. The Council of Economy is basically nothing other than the 'Economic
Council' instituted by the French Government. It does not seem to me to be a
sufficient compensation for the Ministeralism of the CNT and the FAI, even in
its practical applications. It is necessary to deplore, moreover, the advance of
bolshevisation within the ranks of the CNT characterised by the ever diminishing
possibility for elements at the power base to exercise a vigilant, active and
direct control over the works accomplished by the organisation's representatives
within government committees and Councils. We should create a series of
commissions elected by the CNT and the FAI which have the aim of facilitating,
but at the same time of rectifying whenever necessary the works of our
representatives within the Councils of War and Economy.

This would be necessary in the same way in order to create points of contact
between the personal work of these representatives and the necessities and
possibilities of CNT and FAI initiatives.

11. I have tried to reconcile 'current' considerations, inherent in the
necessities of the historic moment, with the direction of the 'trend' which does
not seem to me to deviate from these necessities. I am not proposing any
'correct direction' to pilots navigating between surface shoals and powerful
currents. Policy has its own necessities and the moment imposes on the Spanish
Anarchists the necessity of a 'policy.' But we must be up to the mark of the
historic role which it has been deemed useful to assume. But it is also
necessary not to believe that there are profound breaks of continuity in the
directions of current trends.

To reconcile the 'necessities' of the war, the 'will' of the revolution and
the 'aspirations' of Anarchism: there lies the problem. This problem must be
resolved. On it depend the military victory against Fascism, the creation of a
new economy, the social deliverance of Spain and the evaluation of the
Anarchists' beliefs and actions. Three great things which merit every sacrifice
and impose on each the duty to have the courage to state his own beliefs in
their entirety.

Social democracy and communism betrays the revolution

Originally - The Wisdom of a Proverb

The Swiss Federal Council was the first to inaugurate in the name of
'neutrality' a regime of persecution against the friends of Free Spain, desiring
by this servile and reactionary attitude to pay homage to the ogres of Berlin
and Rome.

An outcry of scandal then arose from the synagogues of Social-Democracy. And
Stalin's admirers protested vehemently.

Soon after, the Belgian government, which is composed of Social Democratic
ministers, expelled Canon Gallegos and Father Lobo, Catholic priests guilty
merely of having declared at private meetings their solidarity with the legal
government of Spain.

Then there was the British government dragging out from the dust of centuries
a law of 1870 which punishes the enrolment of British citizens in foreign
militias.

The United States in their turn brought up for discussion a law of 1811
forbidding North American citizens enrolling abroad.

Finally, the French government obtained from the Chamber of Deputies full
powers to surround Republican Spain with a 'cordon sanitaire' against the influx
of foreign volunteers. And these powers, it received them from the Communist and
Socialist groups in parliament. There is nothing surprising in the attitude of
the Socialists. It coincides with that of 'Populaire' and only serves to confirm
it. But the attitude of the Communists constitutes a scandalous change of
policy. The English Communists had protested at the blockade of volunteers. Ted
Barnales, head of the London section of the English Communist Party had declared
in one of his speeches on 11th November last,

"For or each German soldier in Spain, we will send a seasoned English
fighter. This is our reply to the decision taken by the government to prevent
volunteers departing for Spain."

And 'Humanite' at the news that the French government intended to forbid the
enrolment of volunteers burst out in repeated protests. A platonic gesture on
the part of the French Social Democrat and Stalinist leaders, bound up to the
very end with the wet-blanket government and the human ostrich.

The 'Petit Parisien' of 15th December announced a 'strengthening of control'
on the part of France, and Gabriel Peri wrote in 'Humanite'

"Petit Parisien is the unofficial monitor of the Quai d'Orsay. We would
like to know whether the plan which it is announcing has, as the Petit Petit
Parisien indicates, the approval of M. Delbos. We would like to know if it has
the approval of the President of the Council. If not we would like to read a
denial as soon as possible."

Instead of a prompt denial, the 'Populaire' of 8th January wrote,

"We believe that there would be no difficulty in adopting the advice of the
German government which is proposing, in its reply, to remove from Spain, all
foreigners taking part in the fighting including the political agitators and
propagandists. with the aim of re-establishing the state of affairs existing
in August 1936."

And it concluded,

"We must not lose any time in useless investigation of their intentions by
trying to discover the 'traps' which there may be in the replies of Berlin and
Rome. There is a certain way of overcoming all difficulties. It is by applying
and making all others apply a policy of non-intervention in Spain; by
eliminating from Spain all combatants who are not Spanish. We must do it at
and do it quickly."

With Peri, Cachin, Vaillant - Couturier and company protested. But Moscow
took the helm. And who would associate themselves directly in the name of the
Communist group in parliament with the Blumist 'faction?' Peri was the very man,
he who had maintained with the greatest obstinacy and vehemence that France
should have a policy overtly in favour of the Spanish Republic. The buffoons and
idiots of Bolshevism are as bad as the buffoons and idiots of Social Democracy.
The Socialist parliamentary group trampled on the last resolution of the
executive committees of the IOS and the FSI which declares,

"that the maintenance of peace, which is the supreme asset of the workers
of ail countries and, consequently, the primary concern of governments under
Socialist control or with Socialist participation, can only be assured on the
condition that Democracy opposes an attitude bent on blackmail or fascist
menaces."

The Communist parliamentary group, for its part, completely denied an
infinite number of explicit declarations against French 'neutrality'
declarations made at its meetings and published in its papers, mainly in
'Humanite.'

Non-intervention plays into the hands of Hitler and Mussolini, arid thus of
Franco. The English Memorandum and the French moratorium proposing to the German
and Italian governments that they stop sending volunteers to Spain go back to
3rd December 1936. The Italo - German reply came on 7th January. Thirty-five
days of . . . meditation, thirty-five days of massive dispatch of men and
military equipment to Franco.

The Italian government recruited 'volunteers' by means of orders sent through
the military districts; it directed towards Spain by means of force, men
recruited to work in Ethiopia, it concentrated volunteers for Spain in the
barracks. it even used common law convicts to swell the ranks of the volunteers:
it created concentrations of expeditionary forces in la Speziz, Eboli, Salerno
and Cagliari: and it transported them in the State ships as far as Spanish
Morocco.

After the bombings carried out over Spanish territory by Italian planes,
using for their base the airfield of Elmas after the occupation of Majorca, we
have all the elements of proof to show that Italy has intervened militarily in
the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini has no intention of renouncing Spain. 'Roma
Fascista' does not hesitate to declare. "We are fighting and we shall win in
Spain." 'Il Giornale d'ltalia' implies that French control of access routes to
Spain on land will be virtual. Hitler and Mussolini are demanding the impossible
of the English and French governments: like, for example, suppressing propaganda
in favour of Spain and removing from Spain all foreign anti-fascists.

The bad faith of Mussolini and Hitler appears with as much clarity as the
over careful stupidity of Blum. Mussolini, in contempt for all international
law, has sent at least 20,000 men to Spain, and there are besides (according to
'Ami du Peuple') at least 30,000 German soldiers in Spain. The Italian
government and the German government will continue to send men, arms and
ammunition whatever promises they make.

The Anglo - French neutrality has been is and will always be a hypocritical
intervention in favour of Spanish, German and Italian Fascism.

To accept the supervisory blockade, is the same as putting on the same place
the loyal government and an army of rebels, it is the same as putting Europe in
the dilemma: war or the triumph of fascism. And the triumph of fascism is the
inevitable war of the very near future.

The Blumist policy has never had a clear and coherent line of action because
it is dominated by fear and a tendency to compromise. It is a Social Democratic
policy.

The French Communist Party, by adhering to this policy, has erased one of the
few fine pages in its history, The international repercussions will have
profound consequences. As will the repercussions on French internal politics.
But the most important thing for us is, for the moment, to examine the needs of
our struggle in Spain in relation to the new situation. We will deal with that
elsewhere. Today we are experiencing an agonising and troubling emotion as we
see the wisdom of the popular proverb being confirmed: "May God guard me from my
friends. I can take care of my enemies." (i.e. With friends like these, who
needs enemies? - Translator's note).

Spain, surrounded by declared enemies and false friends will not continue on
its own path any less because of them. We wish with all our filial love for this
magnificent people that this path will lead to the shining heights of triumph.
But even if it leads us to the deepest abyss of defeat, we would always have the
consolation of having wanted to be with the innocent victims and not with the
murderers of unarmed people; of having defended the sacred cause of liberty and
justice and not the return to tyranny and feudal privilege; of having taken part
in the melee, choosing our side decisively, and having rejected the degrading
share of cowardly and stupid compromises.

On the militarisation of the Italian column

Berneri: Unpublished letter on militarisation

Rosselli[1]
envisages having the maximum contact between our column and the other (the
Italian section of the International Brigades attached to the Communist Party.
Translator's note), well I refuse it. But the important problem is that of the
autonomy of our section, autonomy which Rosselli proposes, but which I do not
find advisable, because it amounts to cutting off the majority of the section
which we have formed from a militia responsive to our ideas; because I do not
see how militarisation would exclude us when it did not succeed in separating us
from the Ascaso column. It seems to me, therefore, easier to escape
militarisation by remaining within the CNT and FAI militia, rather than
submitting directly to the military command.

There remains the question of the development of the section. The Italian
column of Albacete (the International Brigades' base. Translator's note)
contains a thousand men, and there is also a column of Germans similarly
organised by the communists who number 200. From a trustworthy source, we know
that since the start some 8,000 Germans have entered Spain, commanded by
'Russian officers.' It is obvious that Madrid is organising its own 'Tercio': a
foreign legion which, well armed and well commanded will be able to restore
order. The increase in the police forces (guardias de asalto and guardias
civiles) and the mass arrival of Moscow's Moroccans must give us pause for
thought. All those who would be on our side in the event of any attempt to
stifle the revolution can be considered as good allies. On the other hand I
continue to consider useful the politically heterogeneous character of our
column. Battistelli, to give only one example, is an ideal officer for a column
such as ours, and S. would not be.

The more the war intensifies, the more the need to perfect the commanding
ranks will increase. It seems to me in conclusion that the presence of
non-anarchist elements in our column has been militarily and politically not
negative.

Setting aside the breaking up of our column and our militia, the agreement
between us and the members of 'Giustizia e Liberta' could rest on these two
points:

1. Carlo Rorsselli and his brother were behind the 'Giustizia
e Liberta' group which called for a united anti-fascist front for a Socialist
Republic. Berneri followed their position closely. (Translator's note).

2. Berneri was not involved in the column since he was running
'Guerra di Classe'. The letter seems to be from October 1936. It was published
in 'Volonta' 19th July 1951.

Counter Revolution on the March

In the course of September 1930, Azana who was a member, with Zamora and
Leroux, of the Provisional Government of the Republic, said at a meeting in
Madrid, "We are going to conquer liberty by calling on all anti-monarchist
forces, no matter what name they call themselves, no matter where they are."
Such was the phrasing of the first 'holy alliance:' this alliance adopted as its
political common denominator Republicanism. In August 1931 the Republic believed
itself to be strong enough to precipitate the separation of the proletarian
masses which were diverging from the government; the deportations of anarchists
and syndicalists to the prisoner ships of Guinea were ordered by decree. 20th
October 1931 the Cortes, including the Socialist deputies, voted in the Bill
'for the defence of the Republic' which was put into operation by repression of
the anarcho-syndicalist movements. From 1932 onwards the pronunciamento of
Seville showed that Republican Fascism is a greater danger than the monarchist
restoration, but Azana, speaking in the Cortes of General Sanjurjo's attempted
uprising, proclaimed that the Spanish Republic was not sick and "that it has
purged itself of the scattered remnants of the old regime which it still
contained." In January 1933, Azana ordered the massacre of the insurgents at
Casas-Viejas which was approved on 2nd February by 150 Socialist Deputies. In
February 1936, in an interview in 'Paris-Sou', Azana stated that Lerroux and Gil
Robles were liquidated; he declared, "We desire above all that order should
prevail . . . State it clearly, we do not want to make a revolution . . . I want
to govern legally. No dangerous innovations . . . We want social peace, we
desire order, we are moderates.'

After the Fascist insurrection had broken out, the Socialist and Communist
parties returned to Azana's phrase of September 1930: defence of the democratic,
parliamentary Republic. They still persist in this position, opening up a route
to counter-revolution.

Louis Pierard, Deputy in the Belgian Workers' Party, recently recognised in
'Regards' that "Socialism was practically non-existent in Catalonia before the
19th July." The UGT which had at that time 9,000 members in Catalonia, now has
50,000. Such a rapid expansion is significant. The UGT is drawing the middle
class to it. The fish-merchants of Barcelona have joined this organisation en
masse to avoid the 'collectivisation of fish' which figures in the CNT's
programme. What happened in Barcelona has occurred equally in all of Catalonia,
in Aragon and in the Levant. The enemies of collectivisation of the land, of
industry and of commerce have joined the UGT and the PSUC en masse. 'Treball,'
the mouthpiece of the PSUC, fights collectivisation and socialisation, while the
CNT and POUM defend it. Henceforth, the union between the opportunist
possibilism of the leaders of the PSUC and the bourgeois and petty bourgeois who
have entered the Popular Front is evident. Already, in the course of the
insurrection in Asturias, we have witnessed the rapid pseudo-revolutionary
mimicry of the middle classes. When the Committee of Mieres called on employees,
miners, foremen etc....., we witnessed the following phenomenon, described in
the 'Diary of a Miner' published by 'Giustizia e Liberta':

"Scarcely had they read the proclamation, than the right-wing elements
rushed to put themselves under our command; they went so far as to argue among
themselves, each one wanting to be first. Suspicious excess of zeal. They are
the first to salute by raising their fist and to praise the Revolution when
they greet workers. In exchange they receive rations of food, tobacco and
other products, sometimes superior to those of the revolutionaries themselves.
The proletarians are careless and generous like children."

In contrast, the bourgeoisie display cleverness and hypocrisy, "above all
when their life is at risk." After 19th July in Catalonia, in Aragon and in the
Levant this same phenomenon could be witnessed, but in this case to a far
greater extent.

When the Spanish Communist Party published in August 1936 a manifesto signed
by Jesus Hernandez, declaring that they were fighting solely for a democratic
Republic, when the same party confirmed the same line of action on 15th December
of the same year, this was not so must the external plutocracy of the
'democratic governments' which this organisation wished to reassure, but in fact
the thousands of pseudo-neophytes who had infiltrated its ranks and those of the
UGT. Even the. United Youth Movement (JSU) disavowed Socialism; thus their
Secretary General, Santiago Carrillo, was able to declare to the national
congress of the JSU, which was held in Valencia on 15th January 1937, "We are
not fighting for a Social Revolution. Our organisation is neither Socialist, not
Communist . ., . The JSU is not Marxist youth." 'Ahora,' mouthpiece of the JSU
supported this thesis, rejecting the class-based lines of policy.

The counter-revolutionary declarations which Juan Casanovas, President of the
Catalan Parliament, made in the 'Depeche de Toulouse' last March, coincide with
those of Comorera, a militant in the view of the PSUC, made last December. The
elements of the Generalidad who, in October 1934, supported the
autonomist-fascist putsch led by the triumvirate of Badia-Dencas-Mendez have not
disappeared. More proof is furnished by the counter-revolutionary statements of
Nicolau d'Olwer. 'Accion Catalana', the right of the PSUC, Galarza and his
associates: there are the forces of the counter-revolution.

The Spanish Revolution finds itself caught between Burgos and Bilbao (where
the Catholics, the Marxists and the Republicans establish their 'holy alliance'
more and more by suspending the 'CNT del Norte' and imprisoning the Regional
committee of the CNT). It is locked between Burgos and Valencia, where 218
adherents of the FAI and the Anarchist Youth (FIJL) are imprisoned and where the
anarchist journal 'Nosotros' is persecuted. It is wedged between Burgos and
Almeria where old man Moron held in prison one of the most heroic anti-fascist
fighters: Francisco Maroto.

The shadow of Noske looms up. Monarchist-Catholic-traditionalist Fascism is
only one sector of the counter-revolution. We must remember that. It must be
said, We must not be a party to the manoeuvres of this great 'Fifth Column'
whose tenacious vitality and redoubtable mimicry have been showed by six years
of Spanish Republic.

The Spanish Civil War is developing on two politico-social fronts. The
Revolution must triumph on two fronts. And it will overcome.

Berneri's last letters to his family

Originally - The Death of Berneri.

In a letter to his wife, he wrote on 25th April 1937, "I who am not generally
afraid in the face of danger, I am sometimes seized by a fear of death, without
there being any particularly objective reason."

During the night of the 3rd and 4th May he wrote to his daughter
Mane-Louise:

"What evil the Communists are doing here too! It is almost 2 o'clock and I
am going to bed. The house is on its guard tonight. I offered to stay awake to
let the others go to sleep, and everyone laughed, saying that I would not even
hear the cannon! But afterwards, one by one, they fell asleep, and I am
watchful over all of them, while working for those who are to come. It is the
only completely beautiful thing. More absolute than love and truer than
reality itself: What would humanity be without this sense of duty, without
this emotion of feeling bound to those who were, who are distant, ignored,
lost? Sometimes I think that this Messianic sense is no more than escapism, is
no more than the search for and construction of an equilibrium, a stability
which otherwise would precipitate us into disorder or despair. Whatever it is,
it is certain that the most intense sentiments are the most human.

"One can lose one's illusions about everything and about everyone, but not
about what one affirms with one's moral conscience. If it was possible for
life to save Bilbao with my life, I should not hesitate for one instant.
(...)

"All that I have said above has a slightly ridiculous solemnity for anyone
who does not live here. But perhaps one day, if I can talk to you of these
months, you will understand."

[Web maintainers note] On 5th May Berneri was arrested by the Stalinist
police and later that day he was murdered along with another Italian anarchist,
Barbieri.

State, Class and bureaucracy in the USSR

Lenin in 1921 defined the Soviet Russian State as "a workers' state with a
bureaucratic deformation in a country with a peasant majority." This definition
must nowadays be modified in the following way: the Soviet State is a
bureaucratic State where a bureaucratic middle middle class and a workers lower
middle class are in the process of formation while the agrarian middle middle
class still survives.

Boris Souvarin in his book on 'Stalin' (Paris 1935) gives this portrayal of
the social appearance of the USSR.

"The so-called soviet society is based in just the same way on the
exploitation of man by man, of the producer by the bureaucrat - technician of
political power. Individual appropriation of surplus value is succeeded by a
collective appropriation by the State, a parasitic deduction from consumption
carried out by the bureaucracy . . . Official documents leave us in no doubt:
the bureaucracy deducts an unwarranted portion from the work of the subject
classes who are forced to undergo an unrelenting system of sweated labour, and
which corresponds more or less to the old capitalist profit. Thus a new social
category has formed around the Party, which is interested in the maintenance
of the current order and in the perpetuation of the State whose extinction
Lenin predicted as related to the disappearance of classes. If the Bolsheviks
do not have the legal ownership of the instruments of production and means of
exchange, they possess the machinery of the State, which allows them to carry
out all these acts of plunder in different ways. The possibility of imposing
sale prices that are much higher than cost prices contains the true secret of
bureaucratic-technical exploitation which is characterised besides this by
administrative and military oppression."

Bonapartism is no more than the political reflection of the tendency of this
new bourgeoisie to conserve and enhance its own socio-economic situation. In the
appeal to the world proletariat by the Bolshevik Leninist Tambov of 1935, one
can read:

"The aim of the party bureaucracy consists solely of the isolation and
torture of opponents so that they never publicly become useless, that is to
say unfortunate apolitical beings. The bureaucrat, in fact, does not wish you
to be a true Communist. He does not need that. For him that is harmful and
mortally dangerous. The bureaucrat does not want independent Communists, he
wants miserable slaves, egoists and citizens of the worst sort ....

"It would thus be possible that under a true proletarian power, the
struggle against bureaucracy, against the thieves and brigands who impudently
appropriate the goods of the soviets and who are the cause of the loss of
thousands of men through cold and famine, it would be possible that a struggle
or a simple protest would be considered as a counterrevolutionary
offence?"

The cruel struggle between the 'revolutionary' oppositions and 'conservative'
orthodoxy is a phenomenon that is quite natural in the setting of State
Socialism. The Leninist opposition has good reason to point out to the world
proletariat the deformities and degeneracy's of Stalinism, but if the
opposition's diagnosis is almost always correct, the aetiology is almost always
inadequate. Stalinism is only the consequence of the Leninist set up of the
political problem of the Social Revolution. To oppose the effects without going
back to the causes, to the original sin of Bolshevism (bureaucratic dictatorship
as a function of dictatorship of the Party), is equivalent to arbitrarily
simplifying the chain of causality which leads from the dictatorship of Lenin
without any great breaks in continuity. Liberty within a party which denies the
free play of competition among the progressive parties within the soviet system
would today be a spectacular miracle. Workers' hegemony, Bolshevik absolutism,
State Socialism, industrial fetishism: these seeds of corruption could only
produce poisoned fruit such as the absolutism of a faction and the hegemony of a
class.

Trotsky in the role of Saint George struggling with the Stalinist dragon
cannot make us forget the Trotsky of Kronstadt. The responsibility for current
Stalinism goes back to the formulation and practice of the dictatorship of the
Bolshevik Party in the same way as to the illusion of the extinction of the
State as a fruit of the disappearance of classes under the influence of State
Socialism.

When Trotsky wrote (6th December, 1935): "The historical absurdity of
autocratic bureaucracy in a classless society cannot be sustained and will not
be sustained indefinitely," he was saying an absurd thing about the 'historical
absurdity.' In history there is no absurdity. An autocratic bureaucracy is a
class, therefore it is not absurd that it should exist in a society where
classes remain the bureaucratic class and the proletarian class. If the USSR was
a 'classless' society, it would also be a society without a bureaucratic
autocracy, which is the natural fruit of the permanent existence of the
State.

It is because of its function as the party controlling the State machine that
the Bolshevik Party became a centre of attraction for careerist petty bourgeois
elements and for lazy and opportunist workers.

The bureaucratic wound has not been opened and infected by Stalinism: it is
contemporaneous with the Bolshevik dictatorship.

Here are some news items from 1918 and 1919, published by the Bolshevik
press. 'Vetsertsia Isvestia' of 23rd August 1918 talking of the disorganisation
of the postal service, states that despite the 60% decrease in correspondence
the number of employees had increased by 100% compared to the period before the
Revolution.

'Pravda' of 11th February 1919 points out the continual creation of new
offices, of new bureaucratic institutions, for which officials are named and
remunerated before these new institutions begin to operate. "And all these new
employees," says 'Pravda' of 22nd February 1919, "overrun and occupy entire
palaces, when, seeing their number, a few rooms would be enough."

Work is slow and obstructionist, even in offices with industrial functions.
"An employee of the Commisariat of Lipetzk," relates 'Isvestia' of 29th November
1918, "in order to buy nine boxes of nails at the price of 417 roubles had to
fill in twenty forms, obtain ten orders and thirteen signatures, and he had to
wait two days to get them as the bureaucrats who should have signed could not be
found."

'Pravda' (No.281) denounced "the invasion of our Party by petty bourgeois
elements" and complaints about requisitions "of a Selfish nature." In the 2nd
March 1919 issue, the same paper states "We must recognise that recently
comrades who are in the Communist Party for their first year have begun to make
use of methods that are inadmissible in our Party. Making it their duty not to
take any notice of the advice of local organisations, believing themselves
charged to act personally on the basis of their rather limited authority, they
order and command without rhyme or reason. From this comes the latent discontent
between the centre and the periphery, a succession of abuses provoked by the
individual dictatorship."

Speaking of the province of Pensa, the Commissary of the Interior
Narkomvnudel said, "The local representatives of the central government behave
not like representatives of the proletariat, but like true dictators. A senes of
facts and proofs that these strange representatives go armed to the poorest of
people, taking from them the necessities of life, threatening to kill them, and
when they protest, they beat them with sticks. The possessions they have thus
requisitioned are resold, and with the money they receive, they organise scenes
of drunkenness and orgies."

Another Bolshevik, Meserikov, wrote, "each one of us sees each day
innumerable cases of violence, of abuse of power, of corruption, of laziness
etc. All of us know that into our soviet institutions, cretins and incompetents
have entered en masse. We all regret their presence in the ranks of the Party,
but we do nothing to clean ourselves of these impurities . . . " " . . . If an
institution chases out an incompetent, they straight away find another to
replace him, and they entrust him with a responsible post. Often instead of
punishment he gets promotion." (Pravda, 5th February 1919).

In a speech given at the Eighth Congress of the Russian Communist Party
(11th-12th March 1919) Lenin acknowledged, "There are here and there careerists,
soldiers of fortune who have fastened on to us. They call themselves Communists,
but in reality they seek only to deceive us as to their true ideas. They have
'stuck' themselves to us because we are in power, and because the most honest
bureaucratic elements refuse to collaborate with us because of their backward
ideas, whereas these others' do not even have honest ideas, they are merely
climbers.'"

The Bolshevik government revealed itself to be powerless in the face of a
bureaucracy which is super-abundant, parasitic, despotic and dishonest.

Five million bureaucrats became nearly ten million. In 1925 there were
400,000 officials in the Co-operation ('Pravda' 20th April, 1926), In 1927 the
Russian Federation of Food Workers had some 4,287 officials for 451,720 members,
and the Moscow Metalworkers Union some 700 officials for 130,000 union cards.
('Truda' 12th June 1928).

This plethoric bureaucracy does not correspond to intense and efficient
administrative activity. "The directorate of the soviet system from the bottom
to the highest degree has a function of paper-shuffling. The provincial
committee usually sends out one or two circulars every day on every possible and
imaginable question and judges that it has thus fulfilled its obligations." "The
number of circulars giving directives which are received by local cells varies
between 30 and 100 monthly." (Pravda, 7th June 1925).

A top official, Dzerjinsky wrote, "They demand from enterprises the most
varied sort of information, reports and statistical facts, which in our system
form a torrent of paper which obliges us to employ an excessive number of
personnel and damages our real work; a sea of paper is created in which hundreds
of people are lost; the situation of accountability and statistics is quite
simply catastrophic; businesses wearily support the burden of supplying
information on tens and hundreds of different forms, now they measure
accountability in pouds." (One poud = 16,380 kg). (Pravda, 23rd June 1926).

* ****

This phenomenon of the reconstitution of classes 'thanks to the State' was
foreseen by us and virulently denounced by us. The Leninist opposition did not
succeed in deepening their aetiological examination of the phenomenon, and it is
because of this that they did not come to revise the Leninist position in the
face of the problems of the State and the Revolution.

Camillo Berneri. (Article which appeared in 'Guerra di Class' No.2 of 17th
October 1936, page 4 and signed C.B.).

State and Revolution

The Abolition and Extinction of the State

Whereas we anarchists desire the extinction of the state through the social
revolution and the constitution of an autonomist federal order, the Leninists
desire the destruction of the bourgeois state and moreover the conquest of the
state by the 'proletariat.' The 'proletarian' state. they say, is a semi-state
since the complete state is the bourgeois one destroyed by the social
revolution. And even this semi-state would die, according to the Marxists, a
natural death.

This theory of the extinction of the state which is the basis of Lenin's book
'State and Revolution' has been derived by him from Engels who in 'Anti-Duhring'
says,

"The proletariat seizes the power of the state and first of all transforms
the means of production into the property of the state. But by achieving this
it does away with itself as proletariat, it does away with all class
differences and all class antagonisms and consequently also with the state as
the state. Society as it was and as it is at present which is actuated by the
antagonisms between the classes, needed the state, that is to say an
organisation of the exploiting class with a view to maintaining the outward
conditions of production, more particularly with a view to maintaining by
force the exploited class in the oppressive conditions demanded by the
existing mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage labour). The state was the
official representative of the entire society, its synthesis in visible form,
but it was only this to the extent that it was the state of the class which
itself represented in its time the entire society: the state of citizens who
owned slaves in antiquity, the state of the feudal nobility in the Middle
Ages, the state of the bourgeoisie in our time. But by becoming at last the
true representative of the whole society, it renders itself superfluous. As
soon as there is no longer a social class to maintain in oppression; as soon
as the clashes of interest and the excesses are abolished at the same time as
class domination and the struggle for individual existence which is founded in
the old anarchy of production from which they result, there is nothing more to
repress, and a special force for repression, the state, ceases to be
necessary. The first act by which the state confirms itself in reality as the
representative of the entire society - taking possession of the means of
production in the name of society - is at the same time the last proper act of
the state. The intervention of the power of the state in social relations
becomes superfluous in one area after another, and eventually dies away of its
own accord. Government of people is replaced by administration of things and
control of the process of production. The state is not 'abolished'; it withers
away. It is from this point of view that one must appraise the expression: 'a
free popular state' as much for its short-lived interest for discussion as for
its definitive scientific inadequacy; from this point of view also must the
claims of those who are called anarchists and who desire that the state should
be abolished overnight be appraised."

Between the State - Today and the Anarchy - Tomorrow there would be the
semi-state. The state which dies is the 'state as the state' that is to say, the
bourgeois state. It is in this sense that one must take the phrase which at
first sight seems to contradict the proposition of the socialist state. "The
first act by which the state confirms itself in reality as the representative of
the entire society - taking possession of the means of production in the name of
society - is at the same time the last proper act of the state." Taken literally
and out of context, this phrase would signify the temporal simultaneity of
economic socialisation and the extinction of the state. In the same way also,
taken literally and out of context, the phrases relating to the proletariat
destroying itself as proletariat in the act of seizing the power of the state
would indicate the lack of need for the 'Proletarian State.' In reality, Engels
under the influence of 'didactic style' expresses himself in an unfortunate
manner. Between the bourgeois state today and the socialist-anarchist tomorrow,
Engels recognises a chain of successive eras during which the state and the
proletariat remain. It is to throw some light on the dialectical obscurity that
he adds the final allusion to the anarchists "who desire that the state should
be abolished overnight" that is to say, who do not allow the transitory period
as regards the state, whose intervention according to Engels becomes
superfluous, "in one area after another" that is to say, gradually.

It seems to me that the Leninist position on the problem of the state
coincides exactly with that taken by Marx and Engels when one interprets the
spirit of the writings of these latter without letting oneself be deceived by
the ambiguity of certain turns of phrase.

The state is, in Marxist - Leninist political thought, the temporary
political instrument of socialisation, temporary in the very essence of the
state, which is that of an organism for the domination of one class by another.
The socialist state, by abolishing classes, commits suicide. Marx and Engels
were metaphysicians who frequently came to schematise historical processes from
love of system.

'The Proletariat' which seizes the state, bestowing on it the complete
ownership of the means of production and destroying itself as proletariat and
the state 'as the state' is a metaphysical fantasy, a political hypothesis of
social abstractions.[5]

It is not the Russian proletariat that has seized the power of the state, but
rather the Bolshevik Party which has not destroyed the proletariat at all and
which has on the other hand created a State Capitalism, a new bourgeois class, a
set of interests bound to the Bolshevik state which tend to preserve themselves
by preserving the state.

The extinction of the state is further away than ever in the USSR where
static interventionism is ever more immense and oppressive, and where classes
are not disappearing.

The Leninist programme for 1917 included these points: the discontinuance of
the police and the standing army, abolition of the professional bureaucracy,
elections for all public positions and offices, revocability of all officials,
equality of bureaucratic wages with workers' wages, the maximum of democracy,
peaceful competition among the parties within the soviets, abolition of the
death penalty. Not a single one of the points in this programme has been
achieved.

We have the USSR a government, a dictatorial oligarchy. The Central Committee
(19 members) dominates the Russian Communist Party which in turn dominates the
USSR.

All those who are not 'loyal subjects' are charged with being
counter-revolutionaries. The Bolshevik revolution has engendered a saturnal[6]
government, which deports Riazano founder of the Marx Engels institute, at the
time when he is preparing the complete and original edition of 'Des Kapital;'
which condemns to death Zinonev, president of the Communist International,
Kamenev and many others among the best propagators of Leninism, which excludes
from the party, then exiles, then expels from the USSR a 'duce' like Trotsky,
which in short is dead set against 80% of the supporters of Leninism.

In 1920 Lenin was speaking very highly of self-criticism within the lap of
the Communist Party and spoke of 'mistakes' recognised by the 'Party' and not of
the right of the citizen to denounce these mistakes, or those things which
seemed to him to be such of the party in government. When Lenin was dictator,
whoever caused a stir in denouncing the same mistakes which Lenin himself
recognised in retrospect risked or underwent ostracism, prison or death.
Bolshevik Sovietism was an atrocious joke even for Lenin who vaunted the
god-like power of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party over all
the USSR in saying: "No important question be it one of political discipline or
relating to organisation, is decided on by a state institution in our Republic
without a directive emanating from the Central Committee of the Party."

Leninists, Trotskyists, Bordighists, Centrists are only divided by different
tactical ideas. All Bolsheviks, to whatever stream or faction they belong are
supporters of political dictatorship and State Socialism. All are united by the
formula: 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' an ambiguous phrase which corresponds
to 'The People Sovereign' of Jacobinism. Whatever Jacobinism is, it is certain
to cause the Social Revolution to deviate. And when it deviates, 'the shadow of
a Bonaparte' is cast across it.

One would have to be blind not to see that the Bonapartism of Stalin is
merely the horrible and living shadow of Leninist Dictatorialism.

Camillo Berneri

5 Hypostasis: in theology this word is equivalent to 'nuance,'
thus the father, son and holy ghost are three hypostases of a single divine
substance Here the proletariat's act of seizing power is a hypostasis which
contains several magic processes: destruction of the state and the
proletariat.

6 Saturnal: an allusion to the myth of Saturn who ate his
own children. The Party devoured, Trotsky, then Stalin, then Krushchev etc.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat and State Socialism

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is a Marxist conception. According to
Lenin "only he is a Marxist who extends his acknowledgement of the class
struggle to an acknowledgement of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Lenin
was right: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is, in effect, for Marx no more
than the conquest of the state by the proletariat which, organised in a
politically dominant class, arrives, by way of State Socialism, at the
elimination of all classes.

In the 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' written by Marx in 1875 we read:

"between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the
revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to
this also a political transition period in which the State can be nothing but
the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat"

In the Communist Manifesto he was already saying:

"The first step on the path to the workers' revolution is the elevation of
the proletariat to the position of ruling class .... The proletariat will gain
from its political domination by little by little tearing away from the
bourgeoisie all capital, by centralising all means of production in the hands
of the State, that is to say in the hands of the proletariat itself organised
as the ruling class"

Lenin in 'State and Revolution' only confirms the Marxist theory:

"The proletariat only needs the state for a certain length of time. It is
not the elimination of the State as a final aim that separates us from the
anarchists. But we assert to attain this end, it is essential to utilise
temporarily against he exploiters the instruments, the means and the
procedures of political power, in the same way as it is essential in order to
eliminate the classes to instigate the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed
class"

"The State will disappear in so far as there are no more capitalists, there
are no more classes and it is no longer necessary to oppress 'any class'. But
the State is not completely dead as long as 'bourgeois rights' which sanctify
de facto inequality survive. In order that the State dies completely, the
advent of integral communism is necessary."

The Proletarian State is conceived of as a temporary political structure
destined to destroy the classes. Gradual expropriation and the idea of State
Capitalism are at the basis of this conception. Lenin's economic program: of the
eve of the October Revolution ends with this phrase: "Socialism is nothing more
than a State Socialist Monopoly".

According to Lenin:

"The distinction between the Marxists and the Anarchists consists of
this:

1. The Marxists, although they propose the complete destruction of the
State believe that this can only be realised after the destruction of the
classes by the Socialist Revolution, and as a result of the triumph of
socialism which will come to an end with the destruction of the State; the
Anarchists want the complete elimination of the State overnight without
understanding what are the conditions which make it possible.

2) The Marxists proclaim the necessity for the proletariat of securing
political power, of destroying entirely the old machinery of State and of
replacing it by a new mechanism consisting of an organisation of armed
workers of the type of the Commune; the Anarchists, in calling for the
destruction of the machinery of State, do not really know 'with what' the
proletariat will replace it nor 'what use' it will make of its revolutionary
power; they even go as far as to condemn all use of political power by the
revolutionary proletariat and reject the revolutionary dictatorship of the
proletariat.

3) The Marxists want to prepare the proletariat for the Revolution by
using the modern State; the Anarchists reject this
method.

Lenin was disguising the facts. The Marxists "do not have the complete
destruction of the State in mind", but they foresee the natural disappearance of
the State as a consequence of the destruction of the classes by the means of
'the dictatorship of the proletariat', that is to say State Socialism, whereas
the Anarchists desire the destruction of the classes by means of a social
revolution which eliminates, with the classes, the State. The Marxists,
moreover, do not propose the armed conquest of the Commune by the whole
proletariat, but they propose the conquest of the State by the party which
imagines that it represents the proletariat. The Anarchists allow the use of
direct power by the proletariat, but they understand the organ of this power to
be formed by the entire corpus of systems of communist administration -
corporate organisations, communal institutions, both regional and national -
freely constituted outside and in opposition to all political monopoly by
parties and endeavouring to reduce to a minimum administrational centralisation.
Lenin, in the interests of polemic, arbitrarily simplified the facts about the
difference between the Marxists and us.

The Leninist phrase: "The Marxists want to prepare the proletariat for the
Revolution by using the modern State" is the basis of Leninist Jacobinism just
as it is the basis of Parliamentary Government and Social Reformist
Ministerialism.

At the International Socialist Congresses of London (1896) and Paris (1900)
it was established that only parties and workers' organisations which recognised
the principle of the "Socialist conquest of the public authorities by the
proletarian faction organised in a party as a class" could belong to the
Socialist International. The split came about at this point, but in effect the
exclusion of the Anarchists from the International was only a triumph of
Ministerialism, opportunism, and 'Parliamentary Cretinism'.

The anti-parliamentary trade unionists and several communist factions quoting
Marxism as authority rejected the pre-revolutionary or revolutionary Socialist
conquest of the public authorities.

Whosoever looks back on the history of Socialism after the exclusion of the
Anarchists can see for themselves the gradual degeneration of Marxism as a
political philosophy through the interpretations and practices of the
Social-Democrats.

Leninism constitutes, without any doubt, a return to the revolutionary spirit
of Marxism, but it also constitutes a return to the fallacies and abstractions
of Marxist metaphysics.

Problems of the Revolution: the City and the Country

Emile Pouget wrote in 1906 (Almanac of the Revolution),"There are no possible or
effective revolutions except when workers and peasants participate in the
movement. If on the contrary only one of these categories is on the move whether
it is the peasants or the workers the movement will miscarry."

More than in any other circumstance, this necessity of the union of the
peasant and the worker has been emphasised by syndicalist propaganda. Up to now,
the development of the Spanish Social Revolution has shown a remarkable
synchronism between collectivist action in the towns and the country, and the
opposition which existed in the Russian and Hungarian Revolutions have not
presented themselves. That does not mean to say however that they will not
appear tomorrow, and the Spanish comrades must of necessity continue, as up to
now, their effort to maintain an intelligent balance between the city and the
country.

The first antagonism that looms up between the city and the country during
the revolution comes from the urgency of the problem of providing provisions.
Spain has had a great advantage for itself: namely a certain autonomy in
relation to foreign countries. However Spain is beginning to run into
difficulties in resolving the problem of provisioning the towns. And this
problem could become more and more difficult.

Two tendencies appear in the midst of the masses of working people in the
towns: firstly forced requisitioning, then a more pacific and rational
solution.

Forced requisitioning is a great mistake. All history of revolutions shows
this. The French revolutionary government of 1793 tried to use the 'strong'
method, and the results were disastrous: 11th April 1794 the Committee of Public
Safety ordered the requisition of one pig in eight. The owner was to work on it
until it had attained the maximum weight. A great show of circulars and measures
to inspect, pay, conserve, centralise etc. was made. Several months later when
the commissar presented himself to take the animal, he only found a skeleton or
a pig more dead than alive.

The Russian Revolution offers a more recent example of the disastrous effects
of a policy of forced requisition. It fully confirms Kropotkin's predictions in
'The Conquest Of Bread': "When the Revolution breaks out, the Russian peasants
will keep their bread for themselves and their families." The Bolsheviks
themselves recognised the error of forced requisition at the Provincial Congress
of the Soviets which took place in Moscow in 1919. The results of the
expeditions of provisioning parties were disastrous: disorder, plots, peasant
revolts (Lunivsk, Paulovsk, Mokoovsk, Bielieh, Ponikolsk ete), violent
suppression, bad economic results. The frightened peasants sowed less. The
livestock similarly diminished greatly. Rich areas, Tambov, suffered
scarcity.

The policy of requisition completely checked the revolutionary momentum of
the countryside. Emma Goldman recounts an anecdote which clearly illustrates the
miserable condition of the peasants: A group of peasants presented themselves
before Lenin one day to discuss their lot.

"May God protect you," said the oldest of the peasants.

"Are you not happy, my friend? You have lands, cows, chickens, what more do
you went?" replied Lenin.

"Praise be to God, we have land, but you take all the corn; chickens, but
you take away the eggs, cows, but our children have no milk. That, my friend,
is why we are asking you to help us."

The abandonment of requisition, which was again demanded by the Kronstadt
sailors on 1st March 1921, was not announced until the 12th by Lenin at the
opening of the Tenth Communist Party Congress when Trotsky was putting down
Kronstadt.

It is left to us to examine the acquisition of agricultural products. In this
too, the French Revolution offers significant examples of the danger of using
money refused by the peasants and excessively low prices.

If in 1793 the countryside caused famine in the large cities, this was not
due to a fall in cereal production, but because the peasants refused promissory
notes without any security in gold. It would be wrong to believe that only the
rich peasants refused to sell their products, the small farmers were equally
opposed to exchanging the fruit of their sweat for these promissory notes, on
while Kropotkin comments as follows in 'The Great Revolution':

"As long as they offer the peasants a worthless scrap of paper, the
situation did not develop. The foodstuffs remained in the countryside, even if
they had recourse to the guillotine."

The policy of imposed prices had no better effects: the foodstuffs became
scarce. The Assembly lowered retail prices by decree (29th September 1793),
anticipating that wholesale prices would follow. Wholesale dealing stopped, and
commerce also.

The Russian Revolution offers other examples. Seeing that violence did not
produce results, the Bolshevik government began to buy agricultural products,
but it made a new mistake. The price was too low. As in the case of corn the
price of which was slightly higher than before the Revolution when the prices of
industrial products had increased by thirty to forty times.

We have seen that neither forced requisition nor promissory notes have given
good results. There only remains the exchange of manufactured goods for
agricultural products.

Kropotkin, in 'The Conquest of Bread' presented this solution as bring very
effective, although a contributor to Malatesta's magazine (Carlo Molasehi in
'Pensiero e Volonta' Rome 1st January 1925) considers it to be an 'unknown
quantity'. In this connection, I wrote in Fiabbri's 'Lotte Umana' (Paris, March
1928): "When Kropotkin was writing, he was thinking of the torch that was going
to replace the paraffin light, of the spade that would replace the plough etc."
Today the peasant's need for agricultural machines is relative, and in certain
areas and for certain forms of cultivation they are unusable. He possesses many
articles of convenience and no longer needs everything. Few peasants would
exchange their corn for a vegetable cleaner. Before the needs of the peasants
increase and industry abandons the production of luxury articles a certain time
will pass. "Consequently, the peasants will be paid in money, cash of a
recognised weight and value."

Luigi Fabbri added a note in which he observed,

"If the mentality of the peasant is so backward that he demands money, it
will be a good idea to examine how this demand can be satisfied. It is a
hypothesis which for good reasons wounds the anarchists who must do all they
can, by propaganda and by researching other means, to avoid such a choice.
However, it is advisable to bear it in mind that, from an anarchist,
revolutionary, humane and also practical point of view, this choice is
preferable to the system of coercion and of authoritarian
requisition."

As one can see, Fabbri was excluding requisition and was not rejecting money,
but he was not tackling the problem. In my article 'The anarchists and agrarian
smallholding'(La Revista Blanca, 15th November 1932), after declaring myself in
favour of the use of money in trading between the towns and the countryside, I
wrote,

"Naturally a system for the exchange of goods, of work, of means of transport
is always possible as an integral part of the system of buying and selling." If
the local councils or the trade unions, or both at the same time, were the
intermediary organisations between the rural smallholders and the farming
co-operatives and between the latter and the industrial workers, they would be
able to facilitate this exchange without money.

For example, a local council that has organised the production of bread wants
to be provided with corn. It applies to the peasants, offering them in exchange
for their corn work provided by the building co-operative, to which the local
council will give the necessary materials. One could find infinite examples.

At the time I had omitted a fundamental aspect of the problem: agreement
between the prices of the factories and the peasants' ability and desire to buy.
The exchange of commodities between the city and the country is an ideal form
which is not always attainable. It is one of the weak points of Socialist
economics. In the Russian Revolution this was one of the principal factors in
the transition from the SEP (Socialist Economic Policy) to the NEP (New
Political Economy).

Co-ordination between the urban and agrarian economies is much more difficult
than is generally supposed among Socialists. The Catalan peasants refusal of the
proposals for exchange put to them by the Barcelona Wood Syndicate is a typical
example of this. The peasants generally have need of seeds, chemical
fertilisers, agricultural machinery and only later do economic improvement and
spiritual development give them the need for conveniences, aesthetic and luxury
items.

The urban society must therefore respond to these possibilities and to the
peasants' preferences if one wants to avoid antagonisms looming up between the
towns and the countryside. As in the USSR where agricultural and industrial
prices are so widely different that they constitute and perpetuate divergent
interests, the central point of all the variations in Bolshevik economic policy,
and which explains almost all aspects of internal political struggles.

To recap, I should say that anarchists in towns should refuse to take part in
expeditions for forceful requisition and even prevent them, demanding that the
problem of provisioning the towns and the militias be resolved by a common
agreement between the peasants and the workers on the purchase of agricultural
products, whether with a stable currency or by exchange and credit
certificates.

As for the anarchists who live in the country, they must at one and the same
time, repel requisition and fight all attempts at buying up and sabotage, and
carry out an intense campaign of persuasion on the subject of the towns'
problems, like provisioning, in order to facilitate agreement between the
workers in the country and the workers and technicians in the towns, in order to
encourage federation between the urban and rural co-operatives, in order to
promote and support all spontaneous experience which would tend to reduce the
money supply. Harmony between the towns and the countryside is only possible by
avoiding the USSR's mistakes: forced requisition, destruction of consumer
cooperativism, centralisation of distribution, increase of factory prices,
transition from suppression to tolerance of speculators, monetary inflation
etc.

I am not a prophet. I have therefore been able to air some points of view
that are completely superficial, as much to the present as for the future.
However, I consider that it is not useless to suggest plans for relations
between the towns and the countryside, given that this problem draws our
attention and demands deep and meticulous study and elaboration. I leave that
task to those who are more competent, for I am no economist.